Paramount and Seagate in Movie Distribution Deal

Posted on: 18 April 2010

By:Patrick Oliphant

Seagate announced that they begun distributing Paramount movies on some of its FreeAgent Go portable hard drives. The deal with Paramount Digital Entertainment has allowed Seagate to ship specially marked FreeAgent Go hard drives with some of Paramount’s movies. Seagate said the drives are already available for purchase, with a free copy of Star Trek (2009). Other titles are available but require you to buy the license to unlock and view them.

Paramount Digital Entertainment announced a similar deal last year with Kingston Memory. Like this Seagate deal both companies – Kingston and Seagate will preload their USB, SD cards and Hard drives with selected titles from the Paramount catalogue. Under the Seagate deal the films are licensed for multiple drives; Laptop, desktop computer or widescreen television, using the FreeAgent Theater + HD media player.

"Seagate and Paramount Pictures are delivering major motion pictures to consumers in a unique and innovative solution. For years Seagate hard drives have been powering the devices that allow consumers to enjoy their digital libraries. Today, we are simplifying content delivery by giving consumers the ultimate flexibility in how they enjoy their movies all in a convenient package," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president, Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management, Seagate.

The idea of storing movies on portable disk is not a new idea and was already being done by the public. I can only see two advantages to this partnership: a) if the format of the movies is smaller than if you had download it from the internet. b) making it legal to have multiple copies of the movie and being able to watch them on different devices. Otherwise, I think paramount should partner with a mobile phone company such as vodaphone or some other major supplier, and have them preload some of Paramount’s movies on their mobiles. I see more people watching movies on their mobile than they do on Laptops.